Having spent many years in the IT industry, you get to see a lot of new technologies, products, and platforms that start to evolve, gradually mature, and eventually be replaced by something that's faster and better! I guess in some ways, this concept applies to this book as well. When I first started out writing the first edition of this series in 2016, I felt that this would be the pinnacle of technology and nothing could be created to replace it! And now, here I am doing precisely the opposite! Writing this second edition is a just small testament that everything evolves with time! Just look at AWS, and you will see how much the platform has changed and grown, especially in the last couple of years!

I still remember the time when I first started exploring AWS way back in 2009, when it was the early days for the likes of EC2 and CloudFront, still adding new features to them, SimpleDB and VPC just starting to take shape, and so on; the thing that really amazes me is how far the platform has come today! With more than 50 different solutions and service offerings ranging from big data analytics, to serverless computing, to data warehousing and ETL solutions, digital workspaces and code development services, AWS has got it all! Which is one of the reasons why I have always been a huge fan of it! It's not only about revenue and the number of customers, but how well do you adapt and evolve to changing times and demands.

So here we are, back at it again! A new book with a lot of new things to learn and explore! But before we begin with the deep dives into some really interesting and powerful services, let's take this time to traverse a little way back in time and understand what has been happening in AWS over this past year, and how the services that we explored in the first edition are shaping up today!

In this chapter, we will be covering the following topics:

• Improvements in existing AWS services.
• A brief introduction to newer AWS services and what they are used for.
• Plan of attack! How we will progress through the book.